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This chapter examines seven characters in search of a comparative politics: Ostrogorski, the Whig; Bryce, the liberal; Herman Finer, the comparativist; S. E. Finer, the Paretian realist; Philip Williams, the parliamentary democrat; Richard Rose, the social scientist; and Anthony King, the sceptic. While British political scientists may not have originated any grand theories, their contribution to the development of the discipline in the twentieth century can be seen to have been a powerful one. In Britain, the main threat to political science lies not in its being insufficiently...

This chapter examines seven characters in search of a comparative politics: Ostrogorski, the Whig; Bryce, the liberal; Herman Finer, the comparativist; S. E. Finer, the Paretian realist; Philip Williams, the parliamentary democrat; Richard Rose, the social scientist; and Anthony King, the sceptic. While British political scientists may not have originated any grand theories, their contribution to the development of the discipline in the twentieth century can be seen to have been a powerful one. In Britain, the main threat to political science lies not in its being insufficiently ‘professional’, but in the bureaucratization of universities and of research, a process that is bound to prove detrimental to creative work. There has, in addition, been a certain loss of intellectual self-confidence in Britain, parallel perhaps to that loss of national self-confidence which remains the most striking feature of British post-war politics.